Summer Long Back Blog Part 6: The I'm REALLY late Edition

Hi! It's been a while, two weeks to be exact. Listen, I've been busy, but I do have a good reason...sort of. I've been playing video games! A lot of them, I finished Persona 3 and Persona 4. I'm also on my way through Tales of Vesperia as well.

So here's the skinny, I'm going to write a Back Blog on Persona 3 and then I'll do a Persona 4 blog immediately after, believe me I can, I got a lot to say.


Persona 3 is probably the best RPG I've played in a long time. It has a beautiful blend of Dating Sim and Diablo dungeon crawling. For those who don't know, you play a nameless protagonist who comes to the city, while there, he ends up getting into crazy trouble. He finds out that there's a 25th hour that no one knows about called "The Dark Hour" and during that hour his school turns into a giant tower called "Tartarus" filled with monsters called "Shadows". Throughout the length of the game you spend the day conversing and developing Social Links with the various characters in your school and at night you traverse Tartarus.

Running through Tartarus proved to be a hooking experience, if you are into mindless dungeon crawling and you like Turn based RPGs this is definitely the game to pick up. The combat is challenging in ways that most Turn based RPGs aren't, through manipulating the weaknesses of your enemies you leave them immobile (Also known as a Knock Down). When you knock down all of the enemies you can do an "All out Attack", this just means your party attacks the fallen enemies and instant-kills them. The combat diverges away from the basics of attack enemies blindly while healing to stay alive and moves into a more methodical process, almost becoming more of a puzzle game of sorts.

The only problem with the combat is an odd one: You can only control your character during battle. The protagonist that you control is the only character you use in combat. The other party members are computer controlled, at first I thought the idea was completely stupid but it grew on me. The CPUs were relatively intelligent and knew what attacks to use and when to heal, for the bulk of the game things were looking good. That is, until I got to the final boss which completely flipped that idea on its ass. The final boss has this one attack, its a barrier that it puts on itself, when someone attacks the boss with that barrier on it reflects the attack back at them and essentially killing them. Now, it would seem the smart thing to do is just not attacking but here's the underlying problem, YOU CAN'T STOP YOUR STUPID BASTARD TEAM MATES FROM ATTACKING! By the time you get your chance to set them on stand by, if your unlucky like I was in the turn placement, they would have already attacked and killed themselves.

That final boss illuminated the problems with Persona 3's combat in that, when a boss throws out complex move sets that mess with the fact that you cannot control anyone but yourself, the battle turns into a game of, not fighting the boss exactly, but fighting with the your team mates while trying to work around your handicap. I was so happy with the combat until I came to that realization luckily the ending was all worth the trouble.

I wont go too far into spoiler territory but I just want to say that the guys at Atlus are the kings of playing with one's emotions. They do such a great job of creating such lovable characters and then working with that. The ending had so much heartwarming cheese that I couldn't help "Awwing" at. Seriously, I loved every single character in this game, so much so that I felt heartbroken that it was over. I want to be with these people more! I don't want it to be over! Why does it have to end?!?!?